Typically, MR surface coils that are conformable and can be positioned or placed flexibly on the patient are used for imaging examinations using magnetic resonance tomography of body regions such as, for example, the upper body, the abdomen, the liver, the heart, the pelvis or prostate. Here, the aim is to obtain images with the greatest possible image quality with the shortest possible examination period. The short examination time is particularly advantageous in order to reduce the influence of artifacts in motion-sensitive examinations.
For the aforementioned MR examinations, it is possible to place MR surface coils as local coils both beneath the patient (“posteriorly”) and on the patient (“anteriorly”) to acquire signals simultaneously during the MR measurement.
However, to date, these MR examinations have required the use of a combination of two different MR surface coils since there are no MR surface coils that can be used both anteriorly and posteriorly. One problem with this is that the MR surface coil has to be assigned different operating and/or evaluation parameters (so-called “coil file parameters”) in the two different positions in order to achieve the best possible image quality. Moreover, the MR surface coils for anterior and posterior arrangement have coil cables of different lengths or no coil cables. To date, there have been two different arrangements for these MR examinations.
On the one hand, the examinations are performed using a combination of precisely one posterior MR surface coil (a so-called “spine coil”) and an anterior 18-channel MR surface coil (a so-called “body coil”). However, to date, this combination includes a comparatively low number of coil elements in the MR surface coils resulting in a correspondingly lengthy measuring time. Moreover, this combination only achieves low coverage in the longitudinal direction or z direction of the patient.
On the other hand, the examinations can be performed with a coil set made by the company Invivo. In this case, one MR surface coil is positioned anteriorly and another MR surface coil positioned posteriorly. However, the two MR surface coils have different cable lengths and hence require different material numbers. In addition, these MR surface coils are frequently associated with an excessively long measuring time.